Migration policies or the production of an over-exploited labour force. The uses of migrant labour in France and Canada

Abstract

What are the social and historical conditions that make possible the overexploitation of the labor force of these women and men who cross borders to sell their hands, their bodies? In other words, how is migrant labor historically constituted as a specific labor force? To answer these questions, the article examines how the successive statuses of subordination conferred on migrants become the main spring of greater labor exploitation within the different segments of the labor market. In an era of globalized capitalism and internationalization of value chains, migrant labor is therefore deployed in at least two different ways: either through the confrontation of labor rights and social protection systems, or through the denial of the right of residence and, therefore, of full inclusion in common law. In the first case, we find displaced labour in Europe and, more broadly, the whole range of so-called "off-shore" labour management practices in a deterritorialized framework in which national rights can be legally circumvented. In the second case, it is the figure of the undocumented immigrant that appears emblematic of exclusion from common law as a springboard for overexploitation.